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Daniel Kovalovszky

Daniel Kovalovszky ( b.1979 ) lives in Budapest, Hungary. After graduating from high school he studied portrait photography and photojournalism in Budapest, and has been working as a photographer since 2001. Between 2001 and 2010 he made several documentary photography essays, mostly about aging in Hungary. Over the last few years he has become deeply interested in landscape and portrait photography, working on long-term and conceptual projects.

Green Silence

The woods do not care for the loud, suffocating city life, where we people are trying to live or rather trying to survive. The trees are following their own patterns that have been gently hard-coded inside them by some superior energy. The trees exist in an almost imperceptible perpetual motion as they change and breathe. While in the world created by humans a futureless race, alienation and a kind of fossilized economic and moral crisis, which here among the woods appear rather distant, continue to exist. This faraway, ancient silence embodies everything, embracing those who enter. The silence is what I am searching for in places like this. Searching for the boundless in the silence. Searching for the beginning in the infinite. My beginning.

When I step into the land of trees I can fully give myself over to this peaceful search, and for a time I can abandon the artificially created world. At times like this, suddenly a new space enfolds me. The desired infinite space. This is the time when I can truly begin to breathe and I feel as if I am breathing together with nature. It is a specific silence embodying a great power and in this silence you are able to feel something of the greatness and peacefulness signified by the dimensions of the ever-expanding life. In the woods – devoid of people – everything is perfect. In the woods, nothing can be false or wrong. The dried branches, fallen leaves, the thunderstruck tree trunks are what they are supposed to be. This is the foundation, the base, the substructure, the one hundred percent that sets the standard. There is nothing that is unnecessary, nothing is missing; everything is in place the way everything is supposed to be. There is order and silence here. Silence, which is the friendliest and the most tender substance. You cannot press through noisily, because silence allows only silent people to walk through it. This is how its nature works. Silence is a malleable currency. At times you can utilize it, at other times lose something by it. At times it is rated high, at other times low. Sometimes it is worth a lot, sometimes not much. Nowadays it is worth a lot.

I am experimenting and watching nature which surrounds me. I closely pay attention to the passing time, the connection between nature and me, and this silent monitoring of nature somehow therapeutically dissolves into photography. I am attempting to find those “perfect” details of nature that are deeply hidden from our all-devouring civilization. I had no intention to create conventional masterpieces taken from nature. I didn’t want to take advantage of the cheap and easy opportunities offered by nature. All I wished for was to give myself over to solitude, to the strange metamorphosis of time as it was slackening it is pace, to the tiny shifting of nature, where nothing happens apart from the demonstration of the infinite.